People are increasingly interacting with computers and other electronic devices in new and interesting ways. With the increased processing capabilities, connectivity and location tracking, electronic devices have become widespread and used in many everyday activities. For example, people often use electronic devices to search for products, watch videos, listen to music, research, shop for both digital and physical products, and receive news, just to name a few. Other uses include e-commerce shopping, communicating with social communities, friends and family, photography, and many others.
In many computing environments, digital items may propagate in ways that make it difficult to determine the original source of the digital item. This is especially true on the World Wide Web, which is designed to make it easy for one webpage to use digital items from many other webpages. This often results in use or presentation of the digital items without proper attribution information.
While implementations are described herein by way of example, those skilled in the art will recognize that the implementations are not limited to the examples or drawings described. It should be understood that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit implementations to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include”, “including”, and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.